A police commander who began his career in south Phoenix is returning to lead the South Mountain Precinct.

Cmdr. Chris Crockett, a 23-year veteran of the department, began his new assignment Oct. 11.

Phoenix Public Safety Manager Jack Harris said the change in leadership was in the works prior to a police-officer shooting of an unarmed man in south Phoenix on Oct. 5.

“There has been criticism of how we react with the community,” said Harris. “There is a perception that we can do things better. (The shooting incident) may have accelerated the implementation, but it wasn’t the motivating factor.”

Linda Green was home during the incident and witnessed the arrest. “He slammed her down to the ground,” said Green.

Other witnesses say they saw at least one officer kick Colter while she was already in handcuffs. “I thought it was wrong, what they were doing to her, kick her, hit her like that,” said Peggy Salazar. Phoenix Police would not comment about the allegations that Colter was kicked, saying no complaint has been filed.

He had wanted to believe that whoever mailed him the package bomb did so for a reason other than his skin color. But Don Logan couldn’t believe that anymore, not after what he was told by investigators.

It was more than five years after the bombing, and he was driving to the U.S. Attorney’s Office to hear more details about the two White supremacists charged in the crime.

“It just hit me like a ton of bricks,” Logan said. Could it be possible that two men targeted him solely because he was Black? “This don’t make sense to me.”

As the thought rolled around his head, he began to cry. It was only the second time he’d cried since the explosion crippled his hand, burned his arms and hurled chunks of metal deep into his forearm.

Logan had tried to keep his cool since the bombing in his city of Scottsdale office, even making jokes about it when asked to give lunchtime speeches and seminars. He didn’t want to assume the bombing was racially motivated. Authorities had told him they were exploring many possible leads.

But investigators had called him that June morning to tell him about the arrests of Daniel and Dennis Mahon, two avowed White supremacists.

“I was fighting mad,” he said. “How did this happen?”

Logan, now 54, was an unlikely target. He was not an activist. Not a firebrand. For much of his life, Logan shied away from joining Black organizations or doing anything else that would highlight his skin color. He wanted to be Don Logan, not that Black guy named Don Logan.

Yet, it was his skin color that authorities believe made him a target.

Something about that package

Scottsdale’s Office of Diversity and Dialogue is housed with the human-resources department in a nondescript one-story office building near City Hall. On Feb. 26, 2004, the employee who delivered mail dropped off a cardboard box addressed to the office’s director, Logan.

Logan walked out to his secretary’s desk to get scissors.

While doing so, he said, he got a strange feeling about the package. He shook the parcel, listening for rattling. Then he stood to the side, leaned the box away from him and cut the packing tape. He felt heat and saw smoke.

The seconds following the explosion are a blur. Logan remembers running down a hallway, feeling the hot sting of metal shards embedded in his forearm. He looked down and saw blood. Then he was outside, staring up at the sky, wondering what had happened.

Investigators later told Logan that if he hadn’t held the parcel at the irregular angle, the 2-inch-wide hole that was bored into his receptionist’s counter would have been in his chest. They also told him that he was a novelty; they had never spoken with someone who opened a mail bomb and survived.

His wife, mother and sons joined him at the hospital. His room became a stew of emotions: sadness, frustration, anger.

His mother, Doris Logan, went outside for some fresh air. She sat on a bench and prayed. “God, whoever this is,” she said, “please help them because they are hurting.”

A week later, Don Logan was released from the hospital. At home, he broke down in tears. He thought about how close he came to dying. He couldn’t fathom why he was picked as the recipient of one of the rarest crimes: a mail bomb.

Sheltered as a child

Logan, born and raised in south Phoenix, was named after the tap dancer Donald O’Connor, one of his mother’s favorite actors.

His mother grew up in Harris, a segregated town in southwestern Oklahoma, and moved with her family to a still-segregated Phoenix in 1953.

Many of those racial barriers had melted away by the time she met her husband and had two children. She didn’t want her boys growing up with chips on their shoulder. She didn’t dwell on her own encounters with discrimination.

“I always told my kids, if you live in your past, you’ll never see your future,” she said.

She tried to show her kids possible futures by taking them on trips outside south Phoenix.

When the kids wanted fast food, Doris and her husband would drive them to a McDonald’s on Camelback Road. They would shop for Western wear in downtown Scottsdale. She would drive them through Paradise Valley and along the mountainside homes.

She would tell them, “You can have that, too, if you educate yourself and work hard.”

Doris Logan now wonders whether she gave her children too much optimism. Her son did educate himself and work hard. Still, it appears he was bombed for the color of his skin.

“It made me think maybe I was a little bit naive,” she said.

She now tells her grandchildren, who live in predominately White areas of Mesa and Gilbert, to be careful.

“It’s still good to love people, still good to trust people,” she tells them. “Just always be aware.”

Color in Scottsdale

Don Logan attended South Mountain High School and Phoenix College before graduating from Arizona State University with a degree in business administration. He applied for an opening at the city of Scottsdale and started as a traffic engineer in 1979.

He was one of the few African-Americans working, or living, in the city. The city had statistically been one of the least diverse in the nation.

Logan spent much of the next two decades working his way up through various city jobs. He had become the chief of staff for the city manager by the time an issue involving the city’s police department brought racial tensions to the breaking point.

An officer who had been fired claimed rampant discrimination in the department. Among his claims was that police referred to affluent parts of north Scottsdale as a “no (N-word) zone.”

As early as 1994, city officials had wanted to start a diversity office, something that had become a growing municipal trend. This incident gave it new urgency.

It was unspoken, but Logan knew he was being asked to lead the group because he was Black. “For the first time in my whole career, people are going to look at my skin color first before they look at what I bring to the table,” Logan said. “I was apprehensive about that.”

But he thought he could provide a cool-headed perspective that could get people talking about race relations.

Logan became the first director of Scottsdale’s Office of Diversity and Dialogue in 1998.

Within two years, his low-key, non-confrontational style drew criticism. His office was being called “window dressing” by activists who thought he didn’t do enough. Logan maintained he wanted to promote conversation and understanding, not controversy.

Threatening call

When Logan made news, it was mainly to promote events. A Sept. 25, 2003, article printed in the Scottsdale edition of The Arizona Republic was typical of Logan’s press. He touted a Hispanic heritage celebration to be held that weekend with food booths, music, and arts and crafts for the kids.

The next day, there was a message on the office voice mail complaining about the Hispanic celebration.

“The White Aryan Resistance is growing in Scottsdale,” the caller said, according to court documents. “There’s a few White people who are standing up.”

Logan’s office didn’t take it as a threat. But it did call Scottsdale police, which made a copy of the tape.

“That’s basically the last we heard of it,” Logan said.

Prosecutors believe the caller was Dennis Mahon, using his brother Daniel’s phone. Four months later, according to the indictment, Dennis Mahon sent the package bomb to Logan.

While Logan was hospitalized, his e-mail account was flooded with supportive messages, most from strangers.

“It kept me calibrated to the fact there are more good people in the world than there are bad,” Logan said.

Logan could have retired or taken a different job with the city. Instead, he was back to the diversity office about a month after the bombing. He parked in the same spot and went to work in the same office, where shrapnel was still embedded in the walls.

Because most mail bombs are sent for highly personal reasons, federal investigators asked Logan about enemies.

Then they started to pry, looking for affairs or whether he owed money – any reasons someone might have a grudge.

Logan thought the bombing wasn’t personal and that the motive might have been his skin color. But he didn’t talk about it publicly, or even convince himself he was on the right track.

“I wanted it not to be,” he said. “I took that as a default position, but I still would want to see proof.”

‘Purely about hate’

That proof, for Logan, came after a lengthy and extensive federal investigation, one that began with the message complaining about the Hispanic heritage celebration.

Dennis Mahon was a noted White supremacist who had bragged about building pipe bombs and blowing up transformers from 1982 to 1987, court records show. In May 2001, Mahon publicly announced he was moving to Arizona. Prosecutors said that at the time of the Logan bombing, Dennis and Daniel Mahon were living in a Tempe trailer park. They moved out shortly afterward.

On June 25, federal agents arrested the Mahons at their home in rural Illinois.

The court documents Logan saw in the office of the U.S. Attorney that afternoon indicated the possible motive: racism. Quotes taken from wiretapped conversations were sprinkled with epithets and suggested the bomb was planted to teach Logan a lesson.

Logan, swayed by the documents, was convinced he was targeted because of what he represented.

“And it’s about hate, purely about hate,” Logan said.

Logan knows that blatant racists represent a small sliver of the populations. Still, he feels a bit hardened. He has realized the world was not as colorblind as he was brought up to believe.

The bombers didn’t know about his long career as an administrator in a mostly White city, or that he lived in a mostly White suburb of Phoenix, or that he had friends of many races. They didn’t know he wasn’t strident or militant.

“When it’s all said and done, I’m still Black,” he said.

Increase in tension

Logan regrets not being more involved with the African-American community before he was professionally obligated to be as Scottsdale’s diversity director.

“Before I took on that role, there was less of a focus on me being Black, to myself,” he said. “I should have stepped outside of that box, beyond the white picket fence. Knowing where my allegiance was and where my allies were.”

Logan worries about what he sees as increasing racial tensions. There’s racist graffiti sprayed on cars in Fountain Hills. There’s a preacher in Tempe wishing death for President Barack Obama. There are parents preventing their children from seeing a televised presidential address.

Logan sees connections between those actions and the legacy of slavery, connections he might have tried to overlook before the bombing.

“There are going to be people who continue to say, ‘Get over it.’ Well, we can’t get over it because (stuff) like this keeps happening,” he said.

Facing the bomber

Logan retired from Scottsdale in 2007 and is working part-time as a diversity consultant in Glendale. He has vowed to attend every hearing about the case. The Mahons have been ordered held until the trial, which might not occur until mid-2010.

Logan was asked to speak at an early court hearing.

He was apprehensive about how he would react in court. Whether there was some deep-seated anger that would boil over when he saw his accused bomber. Instead, when he first saw Daniel Mahon, looking pale and weak in the most faded of jailhouse stripes, he felt sorry for him.

Logan had written down a statement, but he didn’t use it.

“I need you to know, Judge, that I’m speaking from the heart,” Logan said. “I’ve waited 5 1/2 years for this moment. I’ve waited to look this coward in the face” – here, he pointed toward Daniel Mahon – “to tell him that I refuse to be intimidated by what he did.”

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio launched a two-day crime-suppression and illegal-immigration sweep on Monday, as dozens of protestors lined a south Phoenix street close to where the sheriff outlined the plans at a crowded press conference.

It is the second such operation since the federal government stripped Arpaio of street-level immigration patrols under the direction of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Arpaio contends he still can seek to identify illegal immigrants during street patrols using state laws against human smuggling and sanctions for employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants.

The sheriff said his office plans to target semi-trailers and other load vehicles along alternative routes Valleywide, where human smugglers could be attempting to avoid checkpoints, such as those along Interstate 10 and Interstate 17, en route to drop houses.

“We are also noticing a significant change in travel routes,” Arpaio said. “State highways still remain the main travel paths for smugglers and their co-conspirators, but more and more vehicles are being apprehended at alternative, out-of-the-way routes.”

Arpaio said anyone who films the stops along the interstate, including what he described as “open-borders groups,” would be arrested, saying it is illegal to stop and stand unless it’s an emergency.

“These open-borders activists will be warned only once,” he said.

Dozens of protestors along Lower Buckeye Road stood with signs carrying statements, such as “We are human” and “I will not be bullied.”

During the press conference, Arpaio downplayed questions about whether he was grandstanding while Vice President Joe Biden and the national media were in town. Biden spoke in Phoenix Monday morning about the national economy.

“This is just another example of Arpaio’s lack of respect for the Obama Administration and he continues to thumb his nose at the administration,” said protestor Lydia Guzman, president of SOMOS America. Guzman was among a group of protestors across the street from the entrance of the MCSO training building.

“Arpaio’s sweep was nothing but political posturing,” she said.

Mercedes Mercado-Ochoa, a member of the Mesa Association of Hispanic Citizens, said she believes Arpaio is doing the sweeps just to impress the national media in town.

“He’s spending so much taxpayer money on these crime sweeps that it’s not funny anymore,” she said. “He should be held accountable to the taxpayers for the amount he is spending on these sweeps.”

The sweep will entail 200 members of Arpaio’s volunteer posse and reserves, as well as sheriff’s office deputies. Helicopters will also assist in the operation, which Arpaio said will have a%

Inmates walk after being ordered by Maricopa County Sheriff Officer Joe Arpaio (R) to be placed into new housing to open up new beds for maximum security inmates on April 17, 2009 in Phoenix, Ariz. (Photo by Joshua Lott/Getty Images)

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and several of his deputies are facing a lawsuit claiming they illegally arrested, transported and detained a U.S. citizen and a permanent legal resident at a worksite in Phoenix, Ariz., where deputies were conducting an immigration raid.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Arizona filed the suit August 19 on behalf of Julian Mora, 66, and his son Julio, 19.

The incident took place on February 11, when Julio Mora was driving his dad to work. According to the suit, just 100 yards from where the elder Mora worked at landscaping business Handyman Maintenance, Inc. (HMI), a Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office vehicle cut in front of pick-up truck on a busy public road, forcing Mora to slam on his brakes. Another MCSO SUV flanked the truck.

Two deputies ordered the father and son to get out. They were frisked and restrained with tight plastic zip-tie handcuffs and taken to Mora’s workplace, the site of the raid. The two joined over 100 others who were corralled into an area that was said to resemble a heavily guarded armed camp with men wearing masks and carrying semi-automatic rifles.

“Their situation was extremely unique. One of the most egregious aspects to the Moras is the fact that they were not on the worksite. They were stopped and racially profiled during a routine traffic stop, then brought to the worksite. That makes it particularly more problematic and harder for the county to justify,” said Alessandra Soler Meetze, executive director of the Arizona ACLU. Continue reading →

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